Dangerous Game
by Misery Curtains
Summary: He is a regular here, always coming back, ever since he dared to violate the sanctity of the virtual realm, dared to correct what he had started, dared to complete the mad work of Schaeffer. (HINTED JxA)


The darkness. It's everywhere, suffocating all light and leaving no trace of it. It is here, in the void of slumber and silence, where the boy floats along, going nowhere, heading towards forever. His limber body hangs upon invisible hooks of night as the dream takes him nowhere in particular. The boy called Belpois is no stranger to the void, often dreaming in awed witness of the depths. He is a regular here, always coming back, ever since he dared to violate the sanctity of the virtual realm, dared to correct what he had started, dared to complete the mad work of Schaeffer.

The void ripples with uncertainty. There is another, out there, in the nothing. The boy, Jeremie, he watches from behind opened eyes to see a figure in the distance. All there is to it is the symbol, the eye. Jeremie knows it, has sworn a life of fighting against it, has dared to defy it. Panic grips him, but the dream pushes on. The eye and the boy, they float and bob and levitate within the void's black hold. They slowly feel themselves being pushed closer to each other.

Jeremie figures he knows how it will play out. He has never dreamt without the eye appearing before. It is here, in the dreamscape of his mind, where he has confronted the darkest fears in himself in regards to the great nemesis. Faced horrors cosmic and subconscious on the battlefield of his id, usually awaking in a sweat chilled and frantic. But tonight, no, tonight signals no kind of battle. Not of the typical breed.

Soon, they are face to face. The eye bends and warps, giving the once static insignia a quality too human for Jeremie's liking. The boy watches on to see what'll be unleashed by the manifestation of evil.

There is a flash-

And now, there is a chessboard.

The eye is now followed by a body. Dark-cloaked and reaper-like, Jeremie sees his enemy hold out two king pieces. One white, one black. Jeremie takes white. It acknowledges, as they place their kings upon the battlefield, two respectively coloured kingdoms, complete with armies, arising like candles reversed in their degradation.

Jeremie makes the first move. And then it follows with its own move. They continue in silence for some time. And then, a voice, angered and warping, inhuman like a chorus of devils, speaks.

 _"You play a dangerous game, boy…"_

Jeremie is silent.

 _"You and the others,"_ it continues, _"so young and foolish… almost commendable…"_

The boy holds his tongue in both fear and concentration. He thinks to the time he played the game with her, that rare moment of solitude they shared. He had taught her to play for when she could finally cross the barrier into his world, and his life.

 _"You should give in… spare your loved ones the pain of your demise…"_

His tongues holds still, his mind a flurry of chess maneuvers and possibilities.

 _"Jeremie… give in…"_

The boy is resolute. Until finally-

"You know I can't do that."

The reaper, with its horrible eye, bends to act as if it is scoffing at his meager defiance. _"Jeremie… oh, foolish, foolish Jeremie…"_ The reaper makes another move, wiping out the boy's leftward knight.

The game continues in silence. The ether speaks nothing in the ears of Belpois, for even it, the truest void of his subconscious, dares to see how the game will play out.

Finally, it all reaches a final moment. Jeremie is left with five pieces: king, queen, knight, bishop, and rook. But as he's about to reach for one of them, they morph and change into little figures. Figures he recognizes. The knight becomes a kind of ronin, katana in hand, at the ready with brown eyes narrowed in confrontational focus. The bishop transmogrifies into a stunning Japanese beauty, hiding her face and torso with metallic fans. The rook takes on the appearance of an anthropomorphic feline, prepared to pounce. And the king and queen becomes two young adults, one a blonde boy, the other a girl of pink, hand in hand. The reaper's pieces morph and distort into an army of all too familiar monsters. The pawns contort into a blockade of Hornets and Kankrelats. Rooks into Krabs, bishops into Megatanks, knights into tarantulas. The queen sprouts tentacles and the king becomes a gigantic monster of lava and rock.

The reaper has also changed its form. Now, it is a boy's visage it hides behind. Raven-haired, lean, and with murder in its eyes. No older than a year Jeremie's senior.

 _"Jeremie… I offer you a choice…"_ he growls with a voice of two tongues. _"Behold what will happen to your friends… your loved ones…"_

Jeremie feels a paralysis take ahold of him, and he can now only watch as his five lone pieces go into battle. The samurai, the beauty, and the feline, they all fall and waste away. He watches in terror as the monsters devour the felled, with Scyphozoa and Kolossus on the offense, coming for king and for queen. The two greater monsters, they stop just short of crushing Jeremie's remaining royalty, and it's through tears that he sees not the king and queen, but him and her, huddled together. They are awaiting their end. Their doom. Their fate. Their _annihilation_.

All now stops. The bloodbath has ceased. All that is being echoed within the ether are the miniscule cries of the boy and girl, weeping as one doomed entity.

 _"Giiiiiive… uuuuup…"_

Jeremie's eyes close for a moment. It is here where he sees something. A bright white light. And there, far in the illuminated distance, is a face. A soft caring face. The boy reaches out, and the face, now an entire person, reaches out and says, simply, "Jeremie…!"

The boy called Belpois feels his eyes shoot open. And with the might of a deity, he screams.

. . .

Light explodes in his vision, and Jeremie awakens. The ether has cleared away, and now, there is only his room. His keyboard, thankfully, has a protective cover upon it which successfully kept his saliva from frying any and all circuitry that may lie beneath the keys. He had fallen asleep at his computer again; he figured that he had been pulling another all-nighter, calculating and re-calculating, coding and re-coding. It had just been another one of those nights, he supposed. Jeremie stretched and did his best to make sure the blood was flowing in him properly. He quickly got dressed once he had heard all the other guys in his dormitory shuffling around outside. It was a Sunday, which made sense why no one had come to wake him up. None of his friends shouting in his ear about missing the freshly baked croissants was, he admitted, a nice change.

Just before he's about to leave his dorm, Jeremie notices a tiny black tail escaping into the wall socket underneath his desk. He realizes what his dream had been: an attack on his subconscious, an attempt to make him give in to the darkness that he knew still lurked out there. But now, he knew exactly who to thank.

A certain pink haired girl, who he could see, waiting along with his friends down by the vending machines.

A/N:

Ok, so, this was more or less just an experiment, as well as a way of getting back in the swing of writing fanfics again.

If anyone gets the reference, I'll give you a shout-out in the author's note of my next story.

Whenever the hell that get's published.

Anyways, I'm gonna be doing mostly Code Lyoko stuff for a while.

Just finished watching the entire series, and I was reminded why this show is one of my all-time favourites.

Next one will be better.

Well, I think it will be.

Read, review, follow, favourite, whatever.

You do you.

Love and strychnine,

~Misery Curtains


End file.
